Although it is applicable to any arbitrary systems which include a control unit and at least one peripheral unit connected thereto using a line, the present invention and the set of problems on which it is based will be explained in relation to an ignition system or an injection system for gasoline engines in the field of motor vehicles, for example.
In current motor vehicle technology, systems are used in which peripheral units are connected via lines to a control unit. In this case, the corresponding peripheral units are usually spatially separated from the control unit, because of which special requirements are to be placed on the lines and the interfaces.
Some interfaces and/or bus systems for motor vehicle applications are already known, such as the CAN bus system. These bus systems are not suitable for real-time systems, however, i.e., for immediate triggering of the switching operation in the microsecond range, but rather solely for non-time-critical data exchange in the millisecond range of spatially distributed systems.
Further systems have the disadvantage that they may only upload information during activation of the peripheral unit by the control unit.